With the rapid growth in communication usage in recent years and the high cost of adding landline infrastructure, satellite systems have become an increasingly common solution for providing data and voice communication. Satellite links, either one-way or two-way, may be used for communication between a satellite and a population of user Earth station terminals. These user Earth station terminals may each include an Earth station antenna and various transmit and receive equipment appropriate for communicating with the satellite. These user Earth station terminals may be clustered in a single urban or rural area or may be widely installed over large geography, which may include entire continents and ocean regions. Such systems can provide satellite communication services for numerous and dispersed users in an inexpensive manner.
To allow efficient operation of a satellite system of this type, a satellite provider may utilize several antenna beams formed by one or more satellites to transmit information to and receive information back from user Earth station terminals. Each satellite antenna beam may be associated with a particular geographic area and used for exchanging information with users in that area. Furthermore, each satellite antenna beam may be assigned a particular frequency band or frequency bands, contiguous or non-contiguous, in which to exchange information with users in the area associated with that beam. The use of multiple satellite antenna beams and the allocation of frequency bands to each beam, especially when the total number of beams is greater than the total number of frequency bands, is known as antenna beam frequency reuse. With antenna beam frequency reuse, a user Earth station terminal in a particular location may transmit and receive signals on a beam operating in entirely different frequency bands than other terminals pointed at the same satellite or satellites, but located in different areas where the satellite service is provided through other beams.
When installing a user Earth station antenna, an installer may attempt to point the user antenna to maximize the strength of the signal received from the satellite. In a satellite system incorporating antenna beam frequency reuse however, the signal of interest at two different user terminal locations may be in different frequency bands and may be different in other key characteristics as well. Power sensing devices often used by installers to point user Earth station antennas, commonly referred to as antenna pointing meters, are typically designed to sense the total power received, both signal and noise, from a satellite across a number of channels or frequency bands. Such pointing meters may not be effective in a satellite system incorporating antenna beam frequency reuse since the signal radiated toward a specific location may be in a single channel or frequency band. In this case, the antenna pointing meter senses the total power due to satellite radiation in one channel or frequency band plus noise power due to background noise and any interfering signals present across the channels or bands where no signal is available. Since background noise power is essentially independent of user Earth station antenna orientation, an antenna pointing meter used in this manner is desensitized by noise and is not an effective indicator of maximum signal power from the satellite.